2.3 The name Macedonia in the Middle Ages, Macedonia as a Byzantine theme

The Balkan Peninsula has shared the faith of most of Roman Europe at the end of Antiquity. By the beginning of the 7^th century at latest, the entire Balkan Peninsula, including most of Greece was populated by various Slavic tribes. Only the larger, fortified cities along the Aegean, the Ionian and the Adriatic coasts remained under direct Byzantine control. The Byzantine governors and army completely retreated from the Balkan interior, and although many of the Slavic chieftains nominally accepted the suzerainty of the Byzantine Emperor, the old state apparatus along with its administrative divisions simply ceased to exist.

The 7^th century sources talk about the territories of the various Slavic tribes, not of the ancient province of Macedonia. The memory of ancient Macedon however was not lost. By the end of the 8^th century, the Byzantine Empire managed to reconquer much of the southern Balkans, including central Greece and the Peloponnesus, Thrace, and the Black Sea coast. Although only a small corner of the former Roman province of Macedonia was conquered, more specifically the areas along the lower valleys of the rivers Nestos and Strymon (Mesta and Struma), the Byzantines following the ancient Roman administrative nomenclature called the land of western Thrace, theme Macedonia³¹. This recalls the formation of the Balkan provinces of Dacia Ripensis and Dacia Mediterranea, at the end of the 3^rd century AD, after the Roman legions retreated from Emperor Trajan’s trans-Danubian Dacia. On the same principle, in the 8^th century, the Byzantines gave the newly conquered region of Western Thrace the name of Macedon, being the closest administrative area to the Roman province of Macedonia. The theme of Thrace on the other hand, was essentially the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara.

The core area of the newly established theme of Macedonia consisted of the Maritza’s Valley and its tributaries, and the main centers were in Phillipopolis (modern Plovdiv) and Hadrianopolis (modern Edirne). In fact, the only parts of the Roman province of Macedonia where the Byzantines exerted direct authority, the lower valleys of the Strymon and the Nestos, and the Thermaic Gulf, were the themes of Strymonia and Thessalonica. The bulk of the land that was part of Roman Macedonia was now called Bulgaria, or vaguely, Moesia or even Scythia. Only very few of the ancient toponyms have survived in the written records of the Middle Ages. Even when an ancient city continued its existence after the end of Antiquity, it is often known under a different name in the Medieval Period. It seemed as if the memory of ancient Macedon was lost, at least in its original geographic meaning. However, the applying of the name Macedonia to a land east of the Rhodope Mountains by the Byzantine authorities in the late 8^th century demonstrates just how much significance was stored in this name, almost an entire millennium after the ancient kingdom ceased to exist! The Byzantine Emperors in the period between the mid 9^th and the mid 11^th century proudly dubbed themselves Macedonians and their dynasty, the Macedonian dynasty, although their founder was from Edirne and probably had no relation to the land of ancient Macedon. The name Macedon was obviously not forgotten, although its old meaning was definitely lost by the early Middle Ages.

31 Studies on the name Macedon in this period are practically non-existent. On the theme Macedonia, most modern scholars repeat P.Lemerle’s study Philippes et la Macédoine orientale à l’époque chrétienne et Byzantine, Paris, 1945. Back

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